Good Old Days of Chip and PIN Vs. The Wild West of FinTech

At the Connecting Payments conference on Wednesday we celebrated 10 years since the successful roll out of Chip & PIN in the UK.

This was the largest coordinated shift in consumer payment behaviour since decimalisation, and the celebration was well deserved.

The excellent presentations and panel discussions including those directly involved at the time debated the many lessons learnt and were truly insightful.

Although I was involved in the roll-out from an Issuers perspective, it is only with hindsight that the scale of the undertaking and the impact on customer behaviour and the prevailing Fraud levels is really apparent. Given the sheer scale of experience in the room, I am amazed that our friends in the US are finding it so difficult to implement a proven and mature technology.

Those “good old days” of payments have now been replace by the Wild West of FinTech. Gone is the collaboration around a common set of standards, and in its place are a disparate set of technology solutions seemingly focused on a land grab of market share often targeted at the social networkers.

Of course there are several success stories, but also many notable failures, but from the consumers perspective there is fragmentation and a bewildering choice of payment methods.

Thank goodness for EMV which continues to ensure the security of the humble payment card and allows it to be the backbone for many of these FinTech solutions.